Tekken director’s dream game is a multi-franchise fighter in "a King of Fighters style"

Spend 23 years making Tekken games like series producer and often director Katsuhiro Harada has, and you’ll end up with some pretty good ideas. Crossover characters have proved incredibly popular in Tekken 7, with Akuma from Street Fighter transitioning wonderfully from 2D to 3D, retaining his capacity to absolutely murder people. But what does Harada dream about making? A multi-franchise all-star fighter is the answer.

“There is another guest character that will appear in Tekken with the season pass who hasn’t been announced yet so we are hard at work on that one,” Harada says when we ask about wish list characters for the franchise. “If it’s just a wish list, not necessarily for Tekken 7, I’ve always been interested in taking my favourite characters extending from many different company franchises and putting them into a King of Fighters style.”

This is quite departed from the work Harada has done up to now, though not a million miles away from the presumed plans for the long-delayed, likely cancelled Tekken X Street Fighter. Throw a few SNK characters and a couple of other Capcom franchises in there and you have a recipe for the dream game. Just need to get the multi-million dollar companies to all agree, and we’ll get it happening. Hmm.

In more realistic terms, Harada also talked about the process of porting Geese Howard, and how it’s feeding off the work done to make Akuma work. “It’s quite exciting because when we first started developing Geese and Akuma [prior to that], it was full of new challenges on how to take the character and bring them over to the Tekken series. There are many ways you could go about it. Do you leave the character as he is originally, [only] inside of our game? Do you interpret him as a Tekken character? Do you try to do both where you take the character and have it play as it normally would but do it very skillfully so it matches the game system you have? There’s various roads you can take.

“For Akuma, we were able to make him where you could pretty much control him in the same manner [as in Street Fighter]. We did arrange him quite well I think to match the Tekken gameplay. It was a fine balance because we didn’t just take him as his 2D character iteration but at the same time he wasn’t transformed in to a different Tekken version of himself. We learnt a lot about how to take a 2D fighter and transition him well to a 3D fighting game. This also goes for Geese. We feel like there was a lot of discoveries made that you could make this kind of character in a 3D environment.”

No further hints from Harada as to what he’ll be like, beyond the initial trailer, but if he transitions as well as Akuma did, fans are in for a treat. Expect a lot of excitement for the final guest character too, as they’ve been picked very well so far.